pt 2 The spark that has the way out of the labyrinth
Terence: Ralph and I discussed what we were going to do this afternoon and we decided we would try for a conversational sonata, which means it's supposed to look like an unrehearsed conversation, but we both more or less think we know what we're going to say. I suggested the title "Dynamics of Hyperspace" before Ralph had even been asked to be part of this. I hope it's no embarrassment to him as a professional mathematician.
These words actually mean something in certain disciplines. In other disciplines they only indicate things.
Ralph) Well, I agreed that we didn't want to talk about those old maps of hyperspace.
Terence) What I mean by a new map of hyperspace is this: I think that we've come to a place with the psychedelic experience where the validation of the maps of inner space, that Freud and Jung put forward in the first half of this century, are not valid or complete enough. In other words, LSD validated very well the Freudian concept of the inner universe. It seemed to validate ideas about repression and trauma and the need to dredge material out of the unconscious.
Ralph) And that's what you were thinking of as the old maps? Freud and Jung ...?
Terence) Exactly. And more recent data that comes out of the psilocybin and DMT experience doesn't seem relevant to the human superconscious, unconscious or subconscious. It seems to be more like an objective manifold that lies beyond the personality or any human dimension, yet is accessible through these compounds.
Ralph) Are these old maps like Sanskrit, Tibetan tantric texts? One could call those antique maps.
Those antique maps are closer to what you're talking about, I guess.
Terence) Well, maps grow more and more complete. [...] I said to you this afternoon that if we had to find a formal transition point from your maps to my maps, it was Tom Banchoff's films of hyperdimensional objects.
You might say something about that.
Ralph) Well, I thought of that as a map, only it's not a map. It suggests an image as the videotape we saw suggests some images that we encounter, probably in hyperspace. But it doesn't represent the experience of life in hyperspace at all. Tom Banchoff's best film, Hypercube, is an instructional pedagogic film on travelling in four-dimensional space. This is a good start if the metaphor of dimension is of any use here. When I saw Banchoff's film, which I knew from my knowledge of the mathematical sources was actually a representation in common space of hyperspace, that made the hyperspace idea as a metaphor, as a map context, real for me.
In Banchoff's film you see a hypercube, that means a solid figure in four-dimensional space, the simplest and most symmetrical one, but outlined only by its edges and vertices. It is then projected down, using color as a code for the fourth dimension, into a three-dimensional reality where we can experience it as a solid object represented in the traditional wire frame technology of computer graphics. This looked exactly like DMT trips I've had – so exactly that it deprived me for a long time of the religious fascination that I had with my travels in hyperspace. Because I was afraid that they were simply a precognitive experience of this Thursday evening in Santa Cruz when I would be viewing Banchoff's film. So this is much less than a map, but it's like some context in which to seek metaphors out of which you can make a map.
Terence) Yes, I called the book I wrote with my brother The Invisible Landscape because someone once said to me that psychedelic drugs were like magnesium flares dropped from aircraft. They would briefly illuminate a landscape and then darkness would reclaim everything.
But you don't still think that that was a precognitive experience of seeing Banchoff's films, do you?
Ralph) No, I think that Banchoff's film was a precognitive expression of a DMT trip that he has yet to take.
In fact, the time sequence is not important because the time sequence is only a necessity of a cognitive strategy that we have evolved to deal with three-dimensional space and our motion in it with a very limited mind. [...]
Freud and Jung and all their maps, tantricism – it is all much too limited to use in any way in mapping our experience in hyperspace.
Terence) Yes, perhaps hyperspace is not really what we want to get at, but the idea that there are occult – in the classical sense of hidden – dimensions to reality that are now accessible through the use of these psychedelic compounds. Obvious occult dimensions in reality are the future, the afterdeath state, and then the idea that there are occult or hyperdimensional organs of the human body, specifically the human mind. The human mind is like a fourth-dimensional organ because it seems to come tangential to the body, perhaps only at one point, and yet we feel its imminence as the most overwhelming fact of being. In fact, it is the experience of the fact of being. Right?
Ralph) I guess it's reasonable to put our consciousness at the base of the rest of it and say that it's the seat.
Terence) But I like to think of it not so much as a diffuse field but actually more along medieval lines like the soul and to actually try to imagine that there is an organ attendant upon the living human body that is invisible under all normal conditions, but is, in fact, the raison d'etre that holds the whole fact of metabolism together.
Then when the connection between that hyperobject and the body is broken, the body ceases to be a four-dimensional object. It ceases to have this life in time that we call metabolism, and it becomes merely a lump of matter whose organization is steadily falling away from it, then it's not active any more and it's not interesting.
Ralph) Well, the incarnation of the spirit in a body or the association that we have in our consciousness of our being in the body is a terrible limitation that comes from an over-addiction that spirit has had with incarnation over the centuries. It is perhaps a part of the fact that the earth is a dark planet, but in our travels we frequently have found that the body is left behind. Isn't it so? The experience of consciousness that we have during trips in hyperspace may not involve bodies or anything body-like in the sense of a kind of limitation in spatial or dimensional extension. There may be an increased clarity in a smaller location or something, but the experience of our consciousness in hyperspace is fairly diffuse.
So it could be that the body is something like a computer terminal in its relationship to the host computer, that it's a probe for sensing data experience on planet Earth in common space in a lower dimensional reality, piping it back up to wherever. I have never been able to really buy the idea that consciousness is in the head or in the body or even necessarily nearby.
Terence) Sheldrake, when we talked to him two weeks ago, mentioned Bergson's Matter and Memory.
Since that conversation I read it and, though Bergson is very much an unpopular philosopher in the present context, his idea that memories are not located in the brain – that the brain merely is able to access a dimension that is everywhere – is very modern. It touches ideas like Karl H. Pribram's (Professor at Georgetown University) and all the things that are being said now about Bell's Theorem and the non-locality of information.
But what puzzles me concerning those who are big on the non-locality of information: doesn't it devolve upon them to show why experience, even psychedelic experience, is always particularized? You always do have a particularized experience. Why isn't the psychedelic experience a plenum if all information is everywhere?
Then what is the tuning device that brings out the various aspects of it?
Ralph) Well, since my first distant trip I have totally rejected the idea of explaining or showing why, as you would challenge them to show why. Because those theories, Bell's Theorem, quantum mechanics, mathematics, that is all the efforts to make very low-dimensional, almost common-space dimensional conceptual models for an experience which is much richer than these models. So I couldn't take that seriously. I think that people should take their experience more seriously and try to evolve from this experience models, maps, simple metaphors, or whatever, so that we could make an atlas out of local charts. In this room are people who have travelled extensively and analyzed their experiences using all kinds of knowledge of all the cultures on the planet.
It's very difficult for any two of us, for example you and me, to compare our experience of hyperspace in order to see whether or not there is some kind of overlap where we could agree that this part of experience was the same, so that your map and my map could then be overlapped a little bit. Then I could have confidence that your experience expands this piece of my mind, or my experience expands that piece of yours. With the rest of us working together, if we had any sort of common ground between any two of us, we could build an atlas for the group experience of hyperspace. But even after ten years or more of doing this, I find it very difficult to use any metaphors of ordinary reality to overlap our experience, much of which is obviously identical, but as far as representation in common ground metaphors, no.
So, Bell's Theorem may show the way, but from that experience we have to evolve new consciousness which should grow so as to be able to deal with experience verbally, visually, space-time multimedia musically, to share.
It's very difficult. I'd like to try this out and see if anybody finds that in travelling you experience hyperspace – or whatever you want to call it – you experience life there. It is not that this is the structure of the room – the walls are there in ordinary reality. We have a very low-dimensional thing here, even though in, say, computer technology, you need enormous memory to record a single instant in very low resolution.
In our own perception of life in this room the walls and many things stay fixed, everybody is sitting while one person moves, so this is a very low dimension of reality, and life on this planet is interactive.
When you travel in hyperspace, everything is interactive. The whole universe is as a person and we are relating or dancing with everything. The child says: "Mom, I danced with a rock." The reply is: "Rocks don't dance." We know that everything dances. You poke it, it pokes back. So we don't have the metaphors for this experience.
When we move, we have practiced our conceptual, our cognitive reality with this. Most everything is fixed and one thing moves. We fasten on the thing moving and record that in the log book. In hyperspace travel these metaphors are no good. Where we project down to too low a dimensional representation, we lose things.
All maps are vibrations, are projections. In the map of Paris, for example, many different people occupy the same spot, what I call a spot, on the map of Paris. Much information is lost through mapping reality to a map.
So the dynamics of life in hyperspace exceeds what we can deal with cognitively.
This is, I think, the reason why we have a great deal of trouble describing it to each other.
Is it anything like that for you?
Terence) Yes, it's like that. I think that while we experience it fully we are repressed by the content of the experience. The reason it is so hard to communicate it is because language is a creation of habit, and our habits are all of this lower-dimensional space. So everything is referred downward. Everything in the psychedelic dimension is like this, like that, and yet there is this tremendous sense of inadequacy. Even as you say it is like this or like that, you know that you're betraying it. And I don't think that is necessary.
It isn't that there is something magical that makes these realities state-bounded so that they can never be brought back to experience. It's simply that we have a problem with developing a language that is suitable to the subject and the only way to overcome that is to make the psychedelic dimension more and more a part of our reality, however multidimensional it is.
This is essentially what poetry is attempting to do, but doing it very inadequately or very badly, even when it's doing it at its best. A William Blake or a John Milton says: "Well, yes, you like what I wrote, but if you could only have seen what I saw, you wouldn't even bother with it". So it's a task of building new dictionaries and new languages and bootstrapping ourselves by transforming our language so that, finally, it maps onto the thing beheld in the psychedelic state. And this is a task of a lifetime or many generations, perhaps.
Certainly it's happening now among many people, but it is incomplete and it's frustrating in its incompleteness.
Our language for reality, for what you call the low grade reality, is by no means complete.
Many lyric poets have exhausted themselves without ever reaching for the heights, so the difficulty of mapping these higher order states is very great. Maybe that's why, though we can't exactly articulate it, I gravitate to you as a mathematician, hoping to hear something that will illuminate the problem, because mathematics is a language too and a very different language from the language of ordinary experience. Perhaps both mathematics and ordinary human languages are inadequate to the psychedelic dimension. But this is then where we are in the cultural task.
We need to create a meta-linguistic meta-mathematical, metaphorical language in order to behold these things.
I think it must be possible because people who are loaded together with a very few words do understand these things.
Ralph) It may not be hopeless to think that we will find verbal, mathematical, scientific, musical, artistic metaphors and language strategies for recording and exchanging our experiences to help further our evolution. One cannot stand forever a situation where we cannot compare our experience. Even to tell a joke about life in hyperspace is very bad. So we want this evolution. At the same time we have already experienced it, as you said, only not with these kinds of metaphors but through telepathic experience or whatever one wants to call it. Which is a part of our experience of travelling together, which is a certain proportion of every person's experience of travelling. It varies. Some people are very solitary in their travels, some people always go in twos, sometimes there's millions ...
Terence) Fill the skies ...
Ralph) Flying in group formation on the astral plane. So I think that the expansion of our language, mathematics and what not, has to be an expansion where what is considered to be mystical, the impossible, in search of the miraculous, telepathic and so on, is allowed to become part of everybody's experience. This is one of the most important things, in my view.
I don't know what is necessary to preserve the possibility of the species' future evolution.
It's not hopeless. I think somewhere evolution is possible. We have the glimpse here through our personal experience – our group experiences are extremely frustrating, even this kind of talking and sharing.
Question from the audience:
Do you think there's some behavioral imperative to deny those kinds of experiences as a society?
Ralph) Well, filtration of experience is an ingredient in every social structure ... filtration of experience: "Johnny, rocks do not dance." You are told that you did not dream, that you did not experience what you actually did experience as a child. And that is part of the problem, but even if by some miracle or another you were able to re-program yourself from prenatal on out, as many people are trying to do by re-processing their previous incarnations and everything else, if you could totally clarify your soul so that you had no cultural conditioning at all, then I think there is still a lot of structure missing that we need to have to function as fully expanded beings in hyperspace and to achieve the evolutionary promise of our group consciousness.
Terence) Because the fact of the matter is, though we've talked of hyperspace and used this geometric model which signifies clean breaks between levels, actually this hyperspace that we're talking about is present all the time in the here and now as an aspect of the here and now that is simply not perceived by us.
Think about the reality that we do perceive through the mediation of language and the way it differs from, say, the next highest primate!
Obviously our tremendous awareness of our history, our petition for our future, our baggage of all these abstractions: scientific, cultural or mathematical – this is itself an aspect of being in this linguistically-created space that is different from the space of the experience of an animal. If you want to think of history as pointed toward a moment in time when it will enter hyperspace, then realize that the fact that history exists at all means that this process of entering into hyperspace is well advanced. History is the shock-wave that precedes the entry of a species into hyperspace. A lemur or any creature, even a social insect, cannot enter into hyperspace without entering into history first, perhaps for ten or fifteen thousand years. That is the aura that precedes the entry into hyperspace and it's a domain of accumulating language and metaphor and experience.
Ralph) So perhaps there is an accumulation from the bottom up. To physics we add Bell’s Theorem, to mathematics we add chaotic attractors, to language we add a new poetic metaphor, and thus we create new maps of hyperspace. This is bottom-up accretion. Maybe there is a top-down one where the capability to communicate telepathically between two people is dramatically increased by the accretion of metaphorical skills in telepathic communication or something. Or maybe there are telepathic plants that you find in the Amazon. Suddenly this communication is very clear. I'm biased for the top-down one as I think that from the bottom-up is so feeble, there is so little help, that this is Jack's beanstalk which has got to go to the sky. But you are optimistic, being a word freak, that language can be expanded to the point where one could succeed in describing the experience.
Terence) But I do think there is some kind of – for want of a better word again – hyperdimensional object at the end of history which is casting an enormous shadow over the historical landscape and causing it to be what it is. It's as though history were the shock wave of eschatology. There is an event at the end of history such that when it is finally reached, all time which preceded it will be seen to be adumbrations and reflections of the approach to this thing. It's as though consciousness is attempting to become more and more self-reflective.
And since language is the way, the strategy that is being used, we are getting a fantastic accumulation of languages and cybernetic technology – technologies of storage and delayed replay – so that consciousness is bootstrapping itself toward this omega-point.
But the creode, the cleft in the epigenetic landscape that is directing it toward this end point already exists in some sense. This is like a Platonic model of hyperspace. Plato said: "Time is the moving image of eternity." What he simply meant was that we have a low-dimensional slice of reality in the form of what we call the present, with its perspective on the past, but that actually it is part of a higher dimensional manifold which, beheld in its entirety, is eternity. Consciousness is reflecting itself and culture is the waste product of that process. So it seems to me that what the historical task consists of, is humanity turning itself inside out and that this is the problem with dimensions that we sense so acutely. It is that the body, which is presently exteriorized, must be interiorized. And the soul-mind, which is presently felt – only felt – needs to be exteriorized. One can hark back to the metaphors of alchemy for an idea of what this is. It's the idea that the soul should be potentially condensible as a visible object, or a form of transdimensional or translinguistic matter which is then beheld. By being brought through this process of entry into normal space, the space we experience, the soul is placed beyond the crisis of death which is, somehow, the rending of this connection between the organic and the trans-organic, and with the advent of more and more advanced cybernetic systems, more and more advanced psychedelic substances and shamanic techniques, there is a vast family of these things to be synthesized and explored. The task of exteriorizing the soul and making it familiar will come to be. Apparently then, this end-point of history that we keep talking about is actually the place where biology is left behind because death is overcome by understanding. History is the process of being consciously caught in being without understanding death. Through languages and mathematics and science and all these various strategies, we are attempting to gain a hold on that problem so that we can turn it around. There's nothing that says this is impossible. It simply takes ten or fifteen thousand years to get our ducks in a row so that we can have a firm enough epistemological basis and a firm enough understanding of what the self, the brain, the body, the present at hand, actually mean. Then we can turn the switch and be at play in the fields of the Lord in the human imagination. Don't you think the human imagination is where history is carrying us all? That is Elysium.
Ralph) Well, that might be just a feeble projection of the much more grand ... I wonder what you think is the role of the human anti-imagination? For example, what is going on with the repression and control of psychedelic drugs? Why are people persecuted? Is there a negative force in evolution? Is this archetypal creode at the end of history, the future which is determining the present as effect of the cause, does this have a major evil component?
Terence) This is a real problem. I always feel nervous about sounding dualistic or Manichaeian, but I have the strong intuition that we are not monkeys but we are in monkeys. What we're asking is: "Why is there so much monkey business?" It's because we are having a great deal of trouble. We love the monkey body: we connect it to the earth, we connect it to a long evolutionary history and we believe that we must treasure it.
Yet it's very obvious, looking at the way global society is organized, that the monkey nature is utilizing the discoveries of the angelic or Buddha nature of people – ivory towerists, scientists, seers, and people simply trying to understand how things work. But this information is used by monkeys, generals, politicians, advertising executives and propagandists, and it is lethal. So we are bootstrapping ourselves, and we're not all moving.
If this is a marathon race to the end of history, we cannot all be in the lead.
Ralph) It's very critical, I think, to sit here suggesting that consciousness, the unique inhabitant, the living occupant of hyperspace, in fact has got a serious personality defect. It's got an addictive personality and it likes to incarnate in monkey bodies. There's really a lot of oversoul, we're just about a millionth of one percent of it.
So we are the laggards. We are addicted to the occupation of the monkey-body, otherwise we would have gone back where we belong. Some people think that we've been banished to an incarnation on the dark planet as a punishment, but for what?
First of all you're suggesting that the oversoul has a personality problem and secondly, there is the dualism between the oversoul and the monkey. Are the monkeys a foreign species while the oversoul lives in Beta Orion and the monkeys live on solar earth? Are the monkeys an inferior species? Are they not part of the projection of the conscious soul? Are there different parts? There is not a single occupant in hyperspace, but there are actually different ones. There's oversoul, there's monkeys. Then, I suppose, there's mosquitoes – one of the few living beings I still enjoy to kill. There are these different parts, it is not all one.
Terence) I think that what is loose on this planet and has been for at least a billion and a half years, is a self-replicating information system. It first appears as replicating polymers which then grow sophisticated enough to be DNA and cellular matrices and enzymatic feedback systems and then, at a very late period in its history relative to us, it transcends mere genetic information and evolves epigenetic information such as culture, writing, this sort of thing. This phenomenon is localized in the monkeys. But the thing is that knowledge and understanding are inevitably two-edged, so that as we reach for angelhood to free ourselves, we inevitably gain the power to destroy ourselves. We cannot become some kind of star-roving, hyperdimensional, cybernetic species radiating out through the galaxy unless we go through the very narrow gate that has to do with the fact that we discovered fusion processes while we were still bound to a single planet. We have fifty, a hundred, two hundred years, before we are home free.
We will carry that burden of the knowledge of how to destroy ourselves as a species until we get, as James Joyce said () and once we're (), we leave behind the planetary ecology, the possibility of toxifying the planet and destroying ourselves, but it's clear that angelhood is not easily won. One must banish interior demons. These are demons of knowledge, the wrathful dieties are the knowledge dieties, and the knowledge that they hold is the knowledge of how to blow the planet apart as though you had stuck a stick of dynamite into a rotten apple.
Question from the audience: How come we have so many dangerous people in power positions?
Terence) Well, monkey tribes are about pecking orders and male dominance. These monkey hierarchies are the last to get the news. The militarists do not understand what Ralph understands, or what the people who build these hydrogen weapons understand. They only use these things because they have everybody under their thumb. Power is one game which they play very well. Understanding is another game which people like Ralph play very well ... but the faith of people like Ralph and myself is that the power, the transcendent power of the knowledge in and of itself will be so great that it will overcome the wish of the monkeys to misuse it.
A perfect example of that would be the chip. When the chip was first developed, the alpha males were about to put it in the wastebasket because it didn't work fast enough for the military applications for which the contract had been led to produce it. They couldn't see any reason why this would have any application at all. And then someone outside that research mentality realized that it meant everyone could have a computer. It meant that the computer technology which had been a privileged thing of the ruling military and industrial classes had escaped their control.
I have a real faith that this will always be the case – that all effort to take control of something in the technological area will find it mercurially slipping through one's fingers. It's a moving front of knowledge. The real thing is not to think that it's research scientists pitted against the monkey generals. Orchestrating this whole scenario from hyperspace is the overmind of the species. It is releasing these ideas into consciousness.
We cannot go to the stars without genetic engineering, nuclear fusion, all of these things.
I think that the current situation on the planet with H bombs stacked like cord-wood etc. is a perfectly natural situation. This is exactly what it's like when a species prepares to depart for the stars. There is tremendous risk and the risk factor exponentially rises. Who knows how many species throughout the universe confront this situation and can't make it through. It is a very narrow neck. Naturally, only sophisticated life forms radiate through the galaxy and what sophisticated means we don't know, but we're going to find out because we're going to find out whether we are one or not.
The next hundred years will tell the tale. We will either break free or we will fatally foul the cradle of our origins.
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